Mike,
What you describe is called an "architecture", and it would be alongside i386
and alpha, etc. Your suggestion would call for the creation of the arch "i686"
and packages would be separately be compiled for that arch.
-Jim
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Jim Lynch Finger for pgp key
as Laney College CIS admin: jim@laney.edu http://www.laney.edu/~jim/
as Debian developer: jwl@debian.org http://www.debian.org/~jwl/